What happens if science experiments

If you throw an unopened bottle of purified water into the freezer for a little less than three hours, the bottle will be chilled well below the temperature at which regular water freezes. When you pour this super-cooled water onto a piece of ice, it provides the water with nuclei, causing it to freeze instantly. This experiment makes it easy to see magnetic fields in action. All you need is some iron oxide, some water, and a jar.

When you place an extremely powerful magnet along the outside of the jar, the iron filings are attracted to it, piling up, and following the magnet as you move it around.

In this experiment, a chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar creates "lava" bursting out of a model volcano. As the reaction produces carbon dioxide gas, pressure builds up inside a plastic bottle hidden inside the volcano until the gas bubbles and erupts. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts.

Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Sugary water has higher density than plain water. The solution with more sugar has higher density than the one with less sugar. In this activity, kids will be closely observing natural phenomena, looking for signs of life and growth, and using their senses to experience natural materials.

These skills are extremely important scientific foundations. First, have your child search for natural objects in nature. Fill a bag with interesting sticks, leaves, rocks, twigs, pebbles, and anything else you can find. As you paint, you can discuss the natural colors and features of these objects: What is their texture? What do they notice about each object? Discuss which objects are attracted to a magnet and which are not. What patterns do they notice? What other objects would they like to try?

This super-easy experiment is a really fun way to teach your child about magnets in a colorful, magical way, and it only requires simple materials from around the house. First, cut up several pipe cleaners and place them in a clear plastic box. The box does not need to be fancy, just see-through. For your first time through this demonstration, have your child take a magnet and touch it against the surface of the plastic box. Magnets attract certain types of metal. The pipe cleaners have a thin strip of metal, so the magnet is able to attract those pieces and pull it around the box.

Extension: Next time, think of what other objects could you place in the box? What objects do you predict the magnet could move around? Be extremely careful about what you put in the muffin tin so that you do not start a fire or ruin your pan.

This colorful experiement is a super simple way of demonstrating capillary action, water travel, and color mixing. First, fold six sheets of paper towel lengthwise.

You may need to cut a few inches off so that it fits into the glasses well. They should go from the bottom of one mason jar to the next without sticking up too high in the air.

Next, fill the first glass with a generous squirt of red food coloring, the third with yellow, and the fifth with blue.

Mix it up with a plastic spoon. Leave the other glasses empty. Now add the paper towels. Starting with red, add once end of the paper towel and put the other end in the empty glass next to it. After several minutes, the colored water will travel almost the whole length of each paper towel. You can watch the water do its magic for about 20 minutes! The colored water travels up the paper towel by a process called capillary action. Capillary action is the ability of a liquid to flow upward, against gravity, in narrow spaces.

Paper towels and all paper products are made from fibers found in plants called cellulose. In this demonstration, the water flowed upwards through the tiny gaps between the cellulose fibers. The gaps in the towel acted like capillary tubes, pulling the water upwards. The water is able to defy gravity as it travels upward due to the attractive forces between the water and the cellulose fibers.

The water molecules tend to cling to the cellulose fibers in the paper towel. This is called adhesion. The water molecules are also attracted to each other and stick close together, a process called cohesion. So, as the water slowly moves up the tiny gaps in the paper towel fibers, the cohesive forces help to draw more water upwards. First, challenge your kids to build their own boat out of LEGO bricks.

For an added challenge, only give them a certain number of pieces. Talk to your kids about how weight and design matter. Reflect on good designs and help them understand why they worked well. You can learn about gravity by making a DIY parachute for a light-weight toy. The parachute is easily made from materials around your house, and you can experiment with different strategies and objects.

First, use the scissors to remove the handles from the plastic bag. Next, poke four holes around the plastic bag so that they are the same distance apart and on opposite sides of the bags. Thread one piece of yarn through the hole in the plastic cup and tie the yarn to the cup with a knot. Repeat with all four strands of yarn in the remaining holes. Next, thread the other end of the pieces of yarn through the hole in the plastic bag and tie a knot.

Launch your parachute into the air and see what happens! Does the parachute flight time increase or decrease? You can also try creating the parachute with different materials to replace the paper bag, such as a paper towel or napkin, and see how that affects the performance. First, pour the milk in a small baking dish until the bottom is covered. Next, fill the milk with drops of food coloring.

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But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies have been able to track twins separated at a young age, usually by adoption.

But it's impossible to control retroactively for all the ways that the lives of even separated twins are still related. If scientists could control the siblings from the start, they could construct a rigorously designed study. It would be one of the least ethical studies imaginable, but it might be the only way short of cloning humans for research, which is arguably even less ethical that we'd ever solve some big questions about genetics and upbringing.

Expectant mothers of twins would need to be recruited ahead of time so the environments of each sibling could differ from the moment of birth. After choosing what factors to investigate, researchers could construct test homes for the children, ensuring that every aspect of their upbringing, from diet to climate, was controlled and measured.

Several disciplines would benefit enormously, but none more than psychology, in which the role of upbringing has long been particularly hazy. Developmental psychologists could arrive at some unprecedented insights into personality—finally explaining, for example, why twins raised together can turn out completely different, while those raised apart can wind up very alike. The Experiment: Remove brain cells from a live subject to analyze which genes are switched on and which are off.

You might donate blood or hair for scientific research, but how about a tiny slice of your brain—while you're still alive? Photo: Bartholomew Cooke. Medical ethics wouldn't let you consent to that even if you wanted to, and for good reason: It's an invasive surgery with serious risks.

But if enough healthy patients agreed, it could help answer a huge question: How does nurture affect nature, and vice versa? Although scientists recognize in principle that our environment can alter our DNA, they have few documented examples of how these so-called epigenetic changes happen and with what consequences.

Animal studies suggest the consequences could be profound. A McGill University study of lab rats found that certain maternal behaviors can silence a gene in the hippocampi of their pups, leaving them less able to handle stress hormones.

In , a McGill-led team got a hint of a similar effect in humans: In the brains of dead people who had been abused as children and then committed suicide, the analogous gene was largely inhibited. But what about in living brains? When does the shift happen? With brain sampling, we might come to understand the real neurologic toll of child abuse and potentially a great deal more than that. Researchers would obtain brain cells just as a surgeon does when conducting a biopsy: After lightly sedating the patient, they would attach a head ring with four pins, using local anesthetic to numb the skin.

A surgeon would make an incision a few millimeters wide in the scalp, drill a small hole through the skull, and insert a biopsy needle to grab a tiny bit of tissue.

A thin slice would be sufficient, since you need only a few micrograms of DNA. Assuming no infection or surgical error, damage to the brain would be minimal. Such an experiment might answer some deep questions about how we learn. Does reading turn on genes in the prefrontal cortex, the site of higher-order cognition? Does spending lots of time at a batting cage alter the epigenetic status of genes in the motor cortex? Does watching Real Housewives alter genes in whatever brain you have left?

By correlating experiences with the DNA in our heads, we could better understand how the lives we lead wind up tinkering with the genes we inherited. The Experiment: Insert a tracking agent into a human embryo to monitor its development.